From the Hard Winter

The Civil Works Administration,
or CWA, existed for exactly
one season: winter. In the
depths of the Great Depression,
when unemployment
rates stood as high as 25 percent,
the CWA provided work for around
four million men nationwide. The
program expired after March 31,
1934 — it was to be a stopgap, not
a permanent measure. A year later,
the Roosevelt Administration created
the more permanent Works Progress
Administration, or WPA, which operated
until 1943. Today, the WPA is
far better remembered than its predecessor.
Yet over that one season
in the Palisades, the CWA left an
impressive legacy.

CWA workers first reported to the
park in December 1933. They came
mostly from the towns just to the
south, from Fort Lee or Cliffside or
Fairview. On average, they were
around five hundred men each day.

Their work spanned the park from
Fort Lee to Alpine, most of it along
the riverfront. They graded the new
two-mile extension of Henry Hudson
Drive southward from Englewood
Boat Basin to the park’s new Edgewater
entrance, and they painstakingly
laid a cobblestone base on the new
roadbed for paving. They built seawalls
at Hazard’s Landing, just beneath
the new George Washington
Bridge, and at the Dyckman Street
Ferry terminal. Throughout the park
they built “additional fireplaces, paper
burners, incinerators [and] other general
improvements.”

Besides manual laborers and
supervisors, twenty-seven CWA
engineers were used by the Park
Commission to survey the route of a
newly proposed parkway on the summit
of the Palisades. They produced
“a full set of working plans, estimates,
and specifications for the total
length of the parkway from Fort Lee
to the New York State line.”

Perhaps most ambitious of all,
CWA surveyors staked out sites for
two stone bathhouses, one at Alpine
Beach in Alpine, another at Bloomer’s
Beach in Englewood Cliffs.

A snowstorm dumped almost a foot
of snow late in December. But then
temperatures moderated through January; once or twice the mercury
even climbed into the low 50s. The
snow vanished. CWA crews dug several
miles of trenches to bury water
lines below the frost level; they excavated an underpass beneath Henry
Hudson Drive for the old Lambier trail
in Tenafly; and they started building half a
dozen new refreshment stands and
entrance booths.

At Alpine Beach, workers hammered
together wooden scaffolding
and forms, and they built ramps on
which to move big stones into place.
The walls for the first floor of the
bathhouse began to take shape, with
a graceful archway for the front entrance.
By the end of the month, the
crew there had begun to lay wooden
beams on top of the stone walls they
had just built, for the floor of a second-
story open-air picnic pavilion.

The Bloomer’s bathhouse was to have just a single story, sited on a terrace above the beach. Begun about a week after Alpine, its walls and entrance arch were taking shape by the end of the month as well.

Then came February.

The month started with a blizzard,
another foot of snow. Then the temperature
fell — and fell some more.
The overnight low on February 9,
1934, recorded just before sunrise,
remains the coldest temperature
ever recorded at Central Park: –15
degrees Fahrenheit. In Ridgewood,
where some of the workers lived, it
was –17. It would not rise above 6
that day. A second February blizzard
hit on the 19th; a third on the 25th.
By the end of the month, the mean
high temperature at Central Park for
February 1934 was just under 20º.

It became known as “the hard winter.”

At least once or twice a week a
photographer still went through the
park and snapped pictures of the
progress: in the frozen air of February
9, a worker swings a pick to
excavate the septic system at Alpine;
on February 27, a worker with a
broom pushes snow off the new roof,
so that they can keep working on it.

By the time the CWA allotments expired
on March 31, over four-hundred-thousand
man-hours had been
logged in the park. Funding for the
projects was picked up at a reduced
level by the New Jersey State Emergency
Relief Administration.

The park’s
bathing beaches — with a pair of new
bathhouses and half a dozen new refreshment
stands — opened on schedule
that Memorial Day weekend. They were used by close to half a million
park visitors that summer.

The Bloomer’s bathhouse, “a handsome
structure of native stone, built
upon a terrace, approached by two
semi-circular stairways,” fell into disuse.
Today, the walls still stand, but
the roof has been removed.

The Alpine bathhouse, now called
Alpine Pavilion, “rustic in design and
veneered with great boulders” — with
“architectural features of unusual
beauty and utility” — still stands, even
if the beach it was built to service is
closed. On most weekends in the
warm weather it is the site of parties
and picnics, family get-togethers,
barn dances, even the occasional
wedding. It is also a monument of
sorts — to the men who wrested it
from the hard winter.

EN

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